Is there intelligent life on Planet
Earth? If so, who now holds the licence to make it?

Just when you thought God was winning all
the battles in a world at war with reason and science – all those Creationist
classrooms (at least in ‘God’s country’), all those deaf ears turned to
Darwinian theory – along comes a man-made living cell. Yes: the human species
has created life. It has created a bio-storm in a test tube. And it has done
so without God’s permission. It hasn’t needed to use a spare rib from Eve. It
hasn’t even needed a thunder-and-lightning show over Castle Frankenstein.

So far the human species hasn’t been
struck down for its hubris. But keep watching this space.

No wonder the 63rd Cannes Film
Festival celebrated three score years and three – a new trinitarianism
– by showcasing three films about human beings who invent, create or
reconstruct the real. Reading from east to west they are Abbas Kiarostami’s CERTIFIED COPY (in competition), ChristofferBoe’s EVERYTHING
WILL BE FINE and Jean-StephaneBron’s
CLEVELAND CONTRE WALL STREET (both Directors Fortnight).

In all three movies the main characters
manufacture actuality, or a likeness of it, from the projection of their
wills and imaginations. It’s an act of faith, by which we mean the new faith
– in human potentiation – not the old faith in a supreme being with a beard
and sheet.

Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami
has been here before. Quite literally. He competed at Cannes in 1997and on that
occasion won the Golden Palm with a film made at the frontier between fact
and fantasy. A TASTE OF CHERRY ends with a production crew – Kiarostami’s – browsing the very landscape in which the
movie has generated its story.

But CERTIFIED COPY, in content if not
form, is bolder still. In Tuscany a French single mother (Juliette Binoche) meets and romances an English author (played by
opera singer William Shimell) on his book-signing
tour. After attending his lecture, she hooks up with him; they walk and talk.
They impulsively, improvisatorily start to playact
being a married couple. Before our eyes they start creating new lives,
spinning new backstories. Soon the notionally unreal seems to be becoming
real.

It’s a simple if novel conceit for a
story, and the story takes place all in one day. But as Shimell’s
character says: “There’s nothing very simple about being simple.” At the end
the man and woman find their old honeymoon hotel – or pretend to or appear to
– and visit their old honeymoon room. Like Garbo in
QUEEN CHRISTINA Binoche wanders the furnishings,
touching and feeling them, palpating the past. Shimell
ends the movie gazing and soliloquising into a mirror, wondering who he
really is.

These two people have, as it were, given
each other memory implants. They have injected each other with cells from
lives that never happened – their own lives! Never happened, except in that
most nourishing and fostering of hosts, the human imagination.

Kiarostami is playing God, you could
say, except that in our new age God no longer exists. People themselves shape
their destinies, with the intriguing notion here that that existential
shapingcan extend to past as well
as future. (And in a parallel universe, which today has more cred than God
anyway as a sciento-philosophical possibility, who
is to say the shared past of Binoche and Shimell’s characters did not happen?)

In Danish director ChristofferBoe’s EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE an entire, thrillerish chain of events is forged – ‘forged’ here
being the right ambivalent, morally enshadowed word
– by the paranoid mind of a hero convinced that what is happening is real. So
are we convinced. Until it isn’t. And even then it
still might be. Think of THE CABINET OF DR CALIGARI (or if you’re too young
SHUTTER ISLAND) and take away the finality even of their surprise twists. Who says the protagonist’s world in those
films, which is really a lunatic asylum, isn’t really the world after all? Or
in a Wagnerian sense a world-asylum, a Welt-Krankhaus?

We are the makers of our individual
worlds and dimensions, suggests Boe (whose past
films include the similarly Borgesian, metaphysical
RECONSTRUCTION). Or, for good or ill, through volition or the volatile
vagaries of victimhood, we can be. Esseestpercipi: ‘To be is to
be perceived’ (as the philosopher Bishop Berkeley put it). Ifreality is proved only
by being perceived – fact of human existence – ergo, what we perceive and the
way we perceive it are the reality.

CLEVELAND CONTRE WALL STREET is as nutty
a title as you would expect from a French-produced ‘documentary’ staging a
mock trial in the main city of Ohio. A group of foreclosure victims act as
plaintiffs – act in the existential not theatrical sense (though you could
argue that too) – against 21 Wall Street banks put in the dock as villains of
the meltdown.

It was in the poorest quarter of
Cleveland, we are told, that the first days of America’s subprime crisis were
worst felt. The Clevelanders lodged a suit for real against the banks, but
the banks wouldn’t play. They stalled and stymied. So this fantasy courtroom
fight is the best the action-bringers can get. They play or present
themselves, with help from a local lawyer, while the banks are represented by
a ‘hired gun’ flown in from New York.

For an unreal trial, it becomes scarily
real. It’s as if the Clevelanders have rubbed a magic lamp and the genie –
the genieof believable
make-believe – comes out. They get, after a fashion, what they wish. But
beware of what you wish for. The life-giving properties of the human
imagination confer autonomy on their creations, just as parents hand down
self-determination to their children. The Clevelanders lose the trial. They
are outfoxed by the hired gun.

In all three films the freedom to
re-think or re-invent a life ends ambiguously at best, chasteningly
at worst. So is creating life the ultimate power or the key to ultimate
powerlessness?

Think of poor God, up in His Heaven. So
lonely, so insecure. He demands to be worshipped. He demands to be praised
and thanked. He seems to need these things in order to be reified, never mind
deified. How insecure can you get? He seems to need to know that His
creations won’t injure, reject, repudiate or despise Him. That they won’t end
up, in their ungrateful way, un-creating their creator.

Which, let’s face it, they now have. The
living cell new-made by man kicks over the last traces of God, or might be
reckoned to. Like a hurricane whirling backwards it wipes out the Bible from
Revelations to Genesis.

Genesis? We do the genesis from now on.
But as Kiarostami, Boe
and Bron so note, don’t expect the power of
creating life to turn our own lives into a walk in the park. Or perhaps they
will be a walk in the park. But, as any filmmaker will tell you who comes
from the noir side of the tracks,
nasty things can happen during a walk in the park…..

COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS.

WITH THANKS TO THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR
CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA.